Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 56.djvu/462

448 which can only be realized at present in modern breech-loading rifles. Although experience has shown the futility of all our efforts to use gun cotton and nitroglycerin explosives in this manner, it has been proved that the nitro-substitution explosives can be employed with safety and effect.

The nitro-substitution explosives are made from nitrobenzenes, nitrotoluenes, nitronaphthalenes, nitrophenols, and bodies of a similar character, and one of them, called joveite, has given excellent results in this country. After having demonstrated that the destructive effect of joveite was greater than that of gunpowder, smokeless powder, or gun cotton, and, by repeated trials under severe conditions, that service shell loaded with it could be fired from service guns under service conditions with safety, on November 3, 1897, the naval officials at Indian Head fired a fused ten-inch Carpenter armor-piercing projectile containing 8.25 pounds of joveite, with a velocity of 1,960 foot-seconds, at a Harveyized nickel-steel plate taken from the armor for the United States steamship Kentucky. The shell passed completely through the armor plate, where it was 14.5 inches in thickness, and burst immediately behind the plate, [n a second round an unfused ten-inch Midvale semi-armor piercing shell containing twenty-eight pounds of joveite was fired with a velocity of 1,925 foot-seconds at the same plate where it was sixteen inches thick. The shell penetrated to a depth of twelve inches, and the heat produced by the upsetting of the shell was so great as to explode the joveite, which broke the plate and burst the shell with tremendous violence. In fact, the explosion was so very severe that the heavy base plug of the shell was sheared longitudinally, an effect never observed] before with any explosive fired at the proving ground.

Notwithstanding that no accident occurred in any of the many firings, that the stability and safety of the explosive are assured, and that the explosion has been effected with a well-known and